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  Thursday 15 October 2026 News / Editorial Trump is abandoning Ukraine to its bleakest winter yet Battered by President Putin’s war of terror and apparently losing crucial support from US intelligence and Elon Musk’s Starlink, Kyiv’s brave citizens are closer to cracking than they have been since the start of the war T he Russian assault on Ukraine is now well into its fifth bloody year. It is increasingly moving off the battlefields of Donbas, where, despite great numerical superiority, Vladimir Putin’s army is making little – if any – progress against its smaller but braver and more professional enemy. Instead, the Kremlin’s strategy is increasingly to wage a war of terror against the civilian population of Ukraine. It is cruel and cowardly, violating the rules of war and international conventions. But such concerns have never troubled President Putin. Ukraine is, to all intents and purposes, actually winning the war on the ground, gaining territory and certainly in no danger of...
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  Opinion | The Luddite and the engineer El-Sayed’s smorgasbord of fanciful proposals embraces statism. He wants to “freeze the training and release” of models until a new Cabinet-level agency can impose a novel regulatory regime. He supports public ownership of the frontier labs. And he naively envisions a treaty with China “to pause and ban superintelligence.” El-Sayed would also require kill switches to be built into all AI systems and impose “severe criminal penalties,” including prison time, for AI executives who break his rules. Public anxiety is palpable, and it’s fair for politicians to take voters’ concerns seriously. But El-Sayed’s approach, which echoes the policies being peddled by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), preys on people’s fears. He wouldn’t erect guardrails so much as throw sand in the gears of human progress. For inspiration, he might instead look to a recent short essay by Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella. Nadella is no Pollyanna about AI’s dange...
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  Europe’s arms stocks send a geopolitical distress signal Financial Times Europe 15 Oct 2026 Shares in rocket launcher maker Thales are among those to have sunk The world looks like an increasingly dark place — especially when viewed from Europe. President Donald Trump’s diesel deal with Russia is as stark a reminder as one could wish for that the continent should be looking to increase its self-reliance when it comes to geopolitics. So why are Europe’s arms stocks so unloved? BAE, Thales, Dassault Aviation and Leonardo have fallen 15-20 per cent in the past six months and Germany’s Rheinmetall has sunk by more than a third. Taken as a basket, their premium to the Stoxx Europe 600 index has shrunk to a mere 12 per cent, viewed as a multiple of forecast operating profit, Bernstein analysis shows. That looks astonishingly low. Between 2025 and 2030, their profit is expected to grow at 17 per cent a year on average, according to estimates collected by Visible Alpha — much faster tha...
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  Is the K-shaped economy really more of an E? Financial Times Europe 15 Oct 2026 Robert Armstrong robert.armstrong@ft.com No idea has left a deeper mark on public conversations about markets and the economy in recent years than the “K-shaped economy”, a concept coined in late 2020. The notion is that since the pandemic shutdown the economy in aggregate has recovered strongly, but that conceals a deep rift. The top arm of the K — the richest top 10 per cent of families, say — is prospering tremendously, while the bottom half of the distribution languishes, punished by inflation without participating, as the rich have, in the boom in financial assets. This idea has been used to explain everything from resilient consumer spending to corporate earnings surprises (good and bad), to our vexed political life. But there is not much timely data on the distribution of income and wealth, so K-explanations (or the rejection of them) have been more a reflection of the preconceptions of the exp...
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  The art of living dangerously   It would be nice to think that the world eco nomy wi l become less shock-prone, but it probably won’t  Financial Times UK 14 Oct 2026  Mar tin Wolf mar tin.wolf@ft.com  The past few days have reminded us of one of the two chief con tem por ary eco nomic real it ies: the pres id ent of the US is a wrecker. Yet this is con sist ent with the other real ity, which is that des pite the dis rup tions and shocks of our era, the world eco nomy remains a power ful growth machine, driven by remark able innov a tions, risk-tak ing fin ance and large accu mu la tions of debt. Can this last? The reason for believ ing that it will is that growth has been the dom in ant fea ture of the global eco nomy since the middle of the last cen tury. Yet we must always remem ber that growth is one thing, but stable growth quite another.  What, then, is the latest Don ald Trump out rage? First, he star ted a war on Iran, without a plan, which has rai...
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  Ed Johnson The Global AI Bust What Will Survive When the Boom Ends Ruchir Sharma | October 13, 2026 Few people doubt that AI is among the most transformative technologies to emerge in the past century. By many measures, it is spreading faster and more widely than any innovation since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Steam engines came into common use in the nineteenth century and electricity in the early twentieth, but their full potential was not realized before the completion of railways, highways, and power grids decades later. Computers for business use emerged in the 1950s, but they gave no visible lift to the economy before the Internet connected them in the 1990s. Commercial artificial intelligence, by contrast, appeared almost overnight on screens worldwide, at a moment when the overwhelming majority of humans already had access to a computer or smartphone. Less than four years after the release of ChatGPT, roughly 30 percent of Americans are now using AI , five t...
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